Uncoupling American Empire , livre ebook

UNCOUPLING AMERICAN EMPIRE
SUNY series in Multiethnic Literature Mary Jo Bona, editor
UNCOUPLING AMERICAN EMPIRE
Cultural Politics of Deviance and Unequal Difference,
1890–1910
YU-FANG CHO
Photograph on cover by Bertha E. Magness (1892–1976), a missionary teacher in Yuhsien, Hunan, China from 1916 to 1921. Courtesy of Missionaries Manuscript Collections, University of Oregon, Eugene.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cho, Yu-Fang
Uncoupling American empire : cultural politics of deviance and unequal difference, 1890–1910 / Yu-Fang Cho.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in Multiethnic Literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4899-2 (hardcover : all. paper) 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Marriage in literature. 3. Marriage in popular culture. 4. Deviant behavior in literature. 5. Deviant behavior in mass media. 6. Cultural pluralism—United States—History—19th century. I. Title.
PS217.M34C48 2013
810.9’355—dc23
2013002081
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my family on both sides of the Pacific
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Unfree Labor and the Geopolitics of Marriage and Sexuality
PART I: UNCERTAIN DOMESTICITY
1. Sexual Deviance and Racial Excess
2. Orientalism, Black Domesticity, and Imperial Ambivalence
PART II: TRANS-PACIFIC ARCHIVES UNBOUND
3. “Yellow Slavery” and Sensational Violence
4. Domesticating the Aliens: Sentimental Benevolence
5. Domesticity, Race, and Colonial Modernity
Postscript: The Obama Paradox
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Illustrations
Fig. 3.1. Wasp , June 4, 1901, Well Up on Chinese Subjects.
Fig. 3.2. Wasp , July–December 1882, The Servant Question.
Fig. 3.3. San Francisco Call , February 21, 1897, Mrs. H. B. HOLMES, Who Was Insulted by a Chinese on Market Street.
Fig. 3.4. Harper’s Weekly , September 25, 1869, p. 624, The Last Addition to the Family.
Fig. 3.5. Harper’s Weekly , June 12, 1869, p. 384, Pacific Railroad Complete.
Fig. 3.6. San Francisco Call , February 6, 1898, How Thousands of Chinese Infants Are Blinded.
Fig. 3.7. San Francisco Call , February 6, 1898, Sells Babies as He Would Vegetables.
Fig. 3.8. San Francisco Call , July 11, 1897, San Francisco Has the Bravest Women in the World.
Fig. 3.9. Missionaries Manuscript Collections, University of Oregon, Eugene, Photograph by Bertha E. Magness (1892–1976), a missionary teacher in Yuhsien, Hunan, China from 1916 to 1921.
Fig. 4.1. Wasp , December 1901, Chinese Romeo and Juliet.
Fig. 4.2. Overland Monthly , July 1899, p. 45, A Celestial Juliet.
Fig. 5.1. The Helping Hand , January 1894, Twelve Bananas for One Cent!
Acknowledgments
Preliminary ideas that informed the central inquiry of this book first emerged when I was a MA graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. For inspiring my thinking about racial politics of gender and sexuality in U.S. cultures and for sustaining my interest in feminist and queer cultural studies, I thank Bruce Burgett, the late Amy Ling, Dale Bauer, and Susan Friedman. At that time, I was unaware that the U.S. empire was already becoming an important area of inquiry for the decades to come, and that I would have an opportunity—as a subject of U.S. imperialism growing up outside of continental United States—to directly engage with the daily reality that I had lived for twenty-two years, but without any critical language to articulate. For the suggestion that the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego (USCD) might be a good fit for me, I thank Bruce Burgett.
At UCSD, I was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to begin unraveling the workings of the U.S. empire under the guidance of leading scholars, who were simultaneously the most dedicated teachers, rigorous intellectuals, and generous mentors. For their intellectual inspiration and unwavering support over all these years, I am forever grateful to Lisa Lowe and Shelley Streeby, cochairs of my dissertation committee, and my committee members. Having the fortune to work with Lisa and Shelley was the best thing that has happened to my professional life—I really have no word to adequately describe my gratitude and my admiration for them. To this day, their examples continue to sustain my passion and commitment. I also thank other committee members for their generous support and their feedback that pushed me to extend my preliminary thinking in crucial ways: Michael Davidson, Rosaura Sánchez, Nayan Shah, and Lisa Yoneyama. At UCSD, I also benefited from developing my ideas by learning from John Blanco, Ann duCille, Ross Frank, Rosemary George, Jack Halberstam, Nicole Tonkovich, and John Carlos Rowe. Wai-lim Yip in particular played a critical role in enabling me to always remember and critically engage what lies beyond U.S. institutional boundaries.
I thank my colleagues at Miami University of Ohio for their engagement with my work or their moral support: Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, Katharine Gillespie, Andrew Hebard, Cheryl Johnson, Nalin Jayasena, Margaret Luongo, Anita Mannur, LuMing Mao, Mary McDonald, Susan Morgan, Julie Minich, Gaile Pohlhaus, Kerry Powell, Brian Roley, Tatiana Seijas, Keith Tuma, and Liz Wilson. I particularly want to thank those who provided extensive comments: José Amador, Mary Jean Corbett, Sheila Croucher, Madelyn Detloff, Stefanie Dunning, Carolyn Haynes, Katie Johnson, Tim Melley, Kaara Peterson, Martha Schoolman, Peggy Shaffer, and Lisa Weems. Senior colleagues beyond Miami also provided generous feedback at different stages: Carrie Tirado Bramen, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Josephine Lee, Michelle Newman, Kent Ono, Siobhan Somerville, Susan Ryan, and John Su.
Librarians and other staff at the following archival collections facilitated my research: the Bancroft Library at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, the Ethnic Studies Library at UC-Berkeley, the Huntington Library, and the Knight Library at the University of Oregon. In particular, Teresa Salazar, the curator at the Bancroft Collection of Western Americana, generously introduced me to the pictorial collections of Chinese in America before they became digitally available to the public through the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project. Susan Snyder’s speedy response to my request for permission is also much appreciated. For financial support, I thank the Bancroft Library, the Huntington Library, the Center for the Humanities at UCSD, the Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC, the Pacific Rim Research Program at UC, and James D. Kline Award for International Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. Miami University also provided a much appreciated Assigned Research Appointment and a Summer Research Appointment to allow me time to write.
I thank my teachers at the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at National Taiwan University for sparking my interest in feminist cultural studies and American studies: Hsiao-Hung Chang, Wen-Yu Chiang, Hsian-Hao Liao, Yao-Fu Lin, Yu-Hsiu Liu, and Liang-Ya Liu. For the memories of days at UCSD that have kept me going, I thank Annie Liu, Aimee Bahng, Jassica Chang, Po-Chung Chen, Iona Chen, Sheng-Hong Chen, Ying-Ja Chen, Clarrisa Cló, Omayra Cruz, Kathy Glass, Jinah Kim, Su Yun Kim, Hellen Lee, Hsiu-Chin Lin, Peter Lin, Kuei-Ju Lin, Jake Maddox, Gabriela Nuñez, Arthur Hsu, Shih-Szu Hsu, Chia-Ho Tsai, and the Schapiro family. For trans-Pacific dialogue, I thank Pin-chia Feng, Amie Parry, Chih-ming Wang, Guy Beauregard, Chris Lee, Yin Wang, and Chien-ting Lin.
I thank the former acquisitions editor at SUNY Press, Larin McLaughlin, for believing in the significance of this book. Nancy Ellegate was a godsend in overseeing the timely completion of the review process, which was significantly delayed due to staff turnover. Andrew Kenyon was incredibly helpful in keeping me informed of the process for a long period of time before Nancy took over. I thank Ryan Morris, Michael Campochiaro, and other staff at the press for their prompt and informative responses to my questions. I am grateful to work with such a friendly and incredibly efficient production and marketing team. Laura Glenn and Ryan Morris, in particular, have provided thoughtful and detailed editorial assistance.
Earlier and shorter versions of three chapters of this book have been published. I thank the editors and readers for their invaluable comments and the publishers for permission to reprint. Chapter 3 appeared as “‘Yellow Slavery,’ Narratives of Rescue, and Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton’s ‘Lin John’ (1899)” in Journal of Asian American Studies 12, no. 1 (February 2009): 35–63. Chapter 4 appeared as “Domesticating the Aliens Within: Sentimental Benevolence in Late-Nineteenth-Century Californ